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I’m leaning against Jane Fonda’s gravestone in the cemetery of Fonda, New York.

I’m glad that I am thinking about all this even though, if I’m lucky, it may not happen for another twenty or thirty years! I’m grateful for this time when I can drive the four-wheeler around my ranch in New Mexico with Malcolm, my grandson, who, at this writing, is eleven years old. I explain the things I’m doing on the ranch so as to be a responsible steward of the land. I tell him why I’m cutting down so many of the trees on my property: how trees have become too plentiful ever since we stopped allowing forest fires to burn, so that now there isn’t enough water for the expanded forests, the meadows have shrunk, leaving less grass and shrubs for wildlife, and bark beetles are turning landscapes into brown wastelands. I explain that we leave the chipped wood on the ground to mulch and hold water, and how, in nature, things have to die so new things can grow. I tell him that one day that land may be his and his siblings’ responsibility, so he needs to pay attention. I hope I am instilling early the sense of the finiteness of things and the preciousness of time.

Letty Pogrebin, in her book
Getting Over Getting Older,
wrote “We teach our children to tell time, but not what to tell it.”
³
I want to teach Malcolm and Viva what to tell time—that everything will someday end and that every day, every hour, every moment of time matters.

In 1982, my father died three minutes before I arrived at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. When I came into his room, I could see that he was gone but I desperately wanted to sit with him, touch him, experience closure, and try to grasp what was left when the spirit has gone. The nurses would have none of it. They insisted that we leave so they could “clean him up.”

Western societies do not psychologically equip us to confront death. It’s viewed as an indignity that needs to be “cleaned up.” But if you really think about it, life exists only in relation to death, just as light exists only in relation to dark and sound exists only in relation to silence. Death gives shape and meaning to our lives. Very old people know this. None of the centenarians I have interviewed were afraid of dying. On the contrary, their very proximity to it seems to give their lives exquisite meaning.

Rachel Lehman, who was 104 years old when I talked with her, told me she thinks of death quite often. “I am willing to accept it and I just don’t care what happens,” she said. Ben Burke, age 101, told me, “Well, we can’t help thinking about death on occasion. But it seems I am so busy, so involved with my different activities that it is kind of on the back burner. But on the other hand I say,
Well, when it happens if I can only be plunking my banjo and
pass off into the sunset, that would be the best of all
—while doing what I enjoy doing.”

Not all societies are as death-denying as ours. All indigenous, preindustrial, precapitalist cultures not only venerate the aged, they consciously cultivate a life-affirming death awareness. In Vietnam, the bones of the deceased are buried in the fields so that they will fertilize the rice that feeds the deceased’s families and, thus, it is believed, there is physical and spiritual continuity, and the children inherit the strength of their ancestors.

In Mexico you can see death all around you as part of everyday life: Souvenir shops display miniature skeletons dancing and playing instruments, and chocolate candies shaped like skeletons. On All Saints’ Day, November 1, families load up on wine, bread, and cheese and camp out on their loved ones’ graves, singing, reminiscing, and celebrating. All these customs demonstrate that part of life is rehearsing for old age and death, welcoming it with open arms, humor, and respect.

We can choose to sink into age, denying, resisting, and protesting, and thus miss the fruits of wholeness. Or we can be liberated to live a full and vibrant life by choosing to
grow
into age, accepting, letting go, embracing the emptiness to come with humility.

Death is a democratic inevitability for every one of us. In my opinion, there’s something worse than death, and that is never having fully lived.

CHAPTER 21

The Work In

I practiced meditation to give my life a spine on which to hang my heart, and a view from which I could see beyond what I thought I knew.

—ZEN PRIEST JOAN HALIFAX

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

—MARCEL PROUST

T
HE JANE FONDA WORKOUT BECAME A VIDEO PHENOMENON IN the 1970s, launching the video industry as well as the acceptability of women’s muscles. But these days, while I continue to maintain my strength, flexibility, and aerobic fitness as best I can, I find myself turning more and more to the work
in.
This chapter is about how I got there. But there are many paths to the realms that lie within.

On several occasions when I was young and lost, I took off to somewhere entirely foreign in the hope that I would “find myself.” The instinct was well-founded. As we learn from mythology, the passage to a new and important phase in life always required the hero (heroes were the only ones written about back then, although plenty of
she
roes had preceded them) to pass into the unknown, cut off from all that was safe and familiar. Joseph Campbell called it the “hero’s journey.”

The problem was, I didn’t understand that the answers I was looking for could come only if I gave myself up to the foreignness, allowing myself to be a blank slate. Instead, although the environs were new, I remained the same old me, desperately seeking the safety of activity and companionship—usually male companionship.

Life in my sixties taught me that I didn’t need to go somewhere “else” to get answers. I do need time alone, time for the introspection I talked about in the previous chapter, and over these last years I have spent weeks and sometimes months at a time by myself. When I am “public,” I’m busily public and pack a lot into each day. Because of this, acquaintances think I have no downtime. They are wrong. I have many responsibilities, not the least of which is earning money to help support loved ones and fund my non-profit organizations. Because of this, I am disciplined in scheduling my downtime.

I have a ranch on a river in New Mexico to which I retreat. There’s a routine that comes with it when I’m alone with my dog Tulea: Get up with the sun; make breakfast; hike or swim for an hour or so, depending on the season; go to my gym for weight work (and aerobics if the weather has precluded the hike or swim); then come back to the house to write or read or sit or, most commonly, a combination of the above. Several times a week I will go fly-fishing for the Zen of it. Two weeks before my seventieth birthday, I added something new: meditation. I had tried—oh, how I’d tried—over the years to meditate, but I could never still my mind, and although I knew it was something I needed (people were always telling me this), I wasn’t motivated to stick with it. But as I was approaching seventy, every fiber in me told me the time had come.

I knew I was in transition, not sure what I was meant to do, uncomfortable with a relationship that had ceased to be meaningful to me. Rather than voyaging to a foreign clime, I decided that the new territory that awaited me was within my own mind—if I could learn to quiet it, that is.

Several months earlier, Jodie Evans, an activist friend who also happens to be deeply spiritual, had invited me to a June seminar at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. She’d told me that Joan Halifax, known for her work with death and dying, would be a speaker, along with Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Mary’s book
Composing a Life
had had a profound effect on me a decade earlier, and because I had begun work on this book, I wanted to hear what Joan Halifax had to say about the end of life.

It turned out that Joan is a Zen master and the abbot of Upaya. With her close-shaved head, shining eyes, and dimpled smile, she radiates such presence that it makes you want some of what she’s having. During a break in the seminar, she took me on a tour of the center, which includes a large temple, magnificent and simple, with a glistening, black wood floor like ones I’d seen in Japan. Woven tatami mats raised about four inches off the floor, each with a flat black cushion on it, lined the bare, hand-troweled plaster walls. Joan explained that various
sesshin
retreats are held in the hall throughout the year, including an eight-day silent
Rohatsu sesshin,
at the beginning of December, focused on the enlightenment of the Buddha. “Hmm,” thought I. “Pretty intimidating language, but—just so happens I will be all by myself at my ranch then, preparing to turn seventy.” I started to get excited.

“What’s a
Rohatsu sesshin
?” I asked, trying to say it right, the way she had, with the accent on the
shin.

“
Sesshin
is an intense silent meditation retreat that unifies the heart and mind,” she replied. “You become clear and open so that you can experience your true nature.
Rohatsu
means the eighth of December, when, in the Japanese Buddhist world, we celebrate the enlightenment of the Buddha but we also mourn our own stupidity.” I got goose bumps. Finding my true nature was just what I needed before I hit seventy. Throwing in a little mourning of my stupidity would make it perfect.

“But I’m a Christian,” I said, hoping this wouldn’t render me ineligible.

“Many Christians come here,” she assured me. “For us, Buddhism isn’t a religion, it’s a practice, a philosophy. One of my Christian friends told me her time here had made her a better Christian.” Always a believer in trial by fire, I signed up then and there.

Five and a half months later, I was in that hall, sitting in silence with sixty women and men ranging in age from nineteen to eighty. My friends couldn’t believe I was really doing it. “Aren’t you scared?” they asked me. Several were positive they could never go eight days without speaking. Scared was the last thing I could imagine being. Excited was more like it. This was a wonderful chance to jump-start a regular meditation practice—and maybe even a deepening of consciousness. As for not speaking, I knew I would relish it. I’m not my father’s daughter for nothing.

During the eight days, we weren’t silent just during meditation. Even in our adobe guesthouses or as we walked to and from the hall in the early mornings and late evenings, the center was bathed in utter silence. We were asked to avoid eye contact and to fold our hands at our waists as we walked. I cheated, of course, sneaking furtive glimpses as I passed other guests and hating myself for being occasionally judgmental. “That one’s a sure loser,” I’d think.

Except for the first meditation period, at 5:45
A.M.,
and the last one, at 8:40
P.M.,
when we faced out into the hall, the rest of the time we sat on black cushions facing the wall, backs straight, hands folded in our laps in a ritual position—left hand resting in the cupped right hand, thumbs touching. That is when, in my case, all hell would break loose between my ears. Who knew there was so much chatter in there? If this was my true nature, I needed to be locked up. I tried to “follow my breath,” as we’d been instructed. I tried shutting my eyes but would fall asleep. (I discovered that I can sleep in a perfect meditation pose without anyone knowing.) I tried opening my eyes a crack, so that just a faint bit of light would come through my lashes. I’d count—four breaths in, four breaths out—and less than five seconds would go by before some thought would come galumphing in and get stuck. Later Joan described it as having a “sticky” mind, like flypaper—all your poor little thoughts buzz around and get stuck and drive you crazy. I would remember to “let it go” and return to the breath, but in another few seconds a new thought would move in and get stuck. “Am I the only person here who is waging a war with my mind?” I’d think. Everyone else appeared to have it all together. Then again, I must have appeared that way, too.

Every forty minutes a lovely gong would sound and we would rise, bow to the center of the hall, turn to our left, and begin a walking meditation, single file, ever so slowly, our hands held in ritual position at waist height, back straight. We reminded me of the black-robed magicians marching up the dungeon stairs in Dr. Seuss’s
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.
The first time we did this, I continually risked bumping into the woman in front of me. “What a loser,” I remember thinking. “Why’s she creeping along like that? She doesn’t even know how to walk.” After a while, trying to get from judgment to meditation, I began to focus all my attention on how each foot slowly touched the ground, heel first, then bit by bit rolling through the arch, the ball, the toes, until the full foot was flat on the ebony-dark hardwood floor. Only then would I lift the other foot. Before I knew it, I was walking just like the “loser.” It was a humbling experience. Mourning my stupidity was becoming a full-time job.